low folds
of ground. At night that glowing landscape weltered there strangely,
passionately, slumbering with uncovered bosom, and outspread twisted
limbs, whilst heaving mighty sighs, and exhaling the strong aroma of
a sweating sleeper. It was as if some mighty Cybele had fallen there
beneath the moon, intoxicated with the embraces of the sun. Far away,
Abbe Mouret's eyes followed the path to Les Olivettes, a narrow pale
ribbon stretching along like a wavy stay-lace. He could hear Brother
Archangias whipping the truant schoolgirls, and spitting in the faces
of their elder sisters. He could see Rosalie slyly laughing in her hands
while old Bambousse hurled clods of earth after her and smote her on
her hips. Then, too, he thought, he had still been well, his neck barely
heated by the lovely morning sunshine. He had felt but a quivering
behind him, that confused hum of life, which he had faintly heard since
morning when the sun, in the midst of his mass, had entered the church
by the shattered windows. Never, then, had the country disturbed him,
as it did at this hour of night, with its giant bosom, its yielding
shadows, its gleams of ambery skin, its lavish goddess-like nudity,
scarce hidden by the silvery gauze of moonlight.

The young priest lowered his eyes, and gazed upon the village of Les
Artaud. It had sunk into the heavy slumber of weariness, the soundness
of peasants' sleep. Not a light: the battered hovels showed like
dusky mounds intersected by the white stripes of cross lanes which the
moonbeams swept. Even the dogs were surely snoring on the thresholds of
the closed doors. Had the Artauds poisoned the air of the parsonage with
some abominable plague? Behind him gathered and swept the gust whose
approach filled him with so much anguish. Now he could detect a sound
like the tramping of a flock, a whiff of dusty air, which reached him
laden with the emanations of beasts. Again came back his thoughts of a
handful of men beginning the centuries over again, springing up between
those naked rocks like thistles sown by the winds. In his childhood
nothing had amazed and frightened him more than those myriads of insects
which gushed forth when he raised certain damp stones. The Artauds
disturbed him even in their slumber; he could recognise their breath
in the air he inhaled. He would have liked to have had the rocks alone
below his window. The hamlet was not dead enough; the thatched roofs
bulged like bosoms; through